" . . . The books of Scripture were set and in use by 110-120 AD. The Sacred Scriptures and the Church’s interaction with them was already functioning from its beginning . . . The Canon was complete by the early decades of the 2nd century . . ."
PART ONE OF TWO:
Luke 22:43-44 has been a contentious passage because it has a very diverse textual history: some manuscripts have it and some do not. When I mentioned this passage in an earlier post, I referred to Bart Ehrman and his conclusion that the verses were not original and were added later. In reality, however, it seems the verses actually were original and were removed from manuscripts in the third and fourth centuries.
I spoke with a New Testament scholar last Friday who will be publishing about the passage later this year in a scholarly journal. His analysis will show, contrary to the conclusions of Erhman and others, that the verses actually were original to Luke and were later removed, resulting in their absence from so many manuscripts and the dubiousness that has been attached to them over the centuries. I was persuaded by Ehrman’s reliance on chiasmus to support his conclusion that verses 43-44 were intrusions into the pericope (verses 40-46); however, the upcoming publication will show how chiastic analysis actually can be shown to be inconclusive. It is, in fact, only a minor point but one worth mentioning.
As readers of my earlier post may have noticed, regarding the issue of chiasmus, Bart Ehrmann mentions in his text that verses 40-46 reveal a chiastic structure centering on verse 42, Jesus praying, with verses 43-44 being intrusive (added later). As will be pointed out in the article coming out later this year, however, both an Italian scholar and a German scholar have shown in their own independently published commentaries on Luke that, indeed, a chiastic structure does exist for the text of verses 40-46 but that the centerpiece of the chiastic structure actually falls within the text of verses 43-44, with those verses being original and not an intrusion. Those scholars, therefore, hold that chiasmus actually supports the authenticity of those two verses.
The bottom line of the upcoming publication insofar as concerns this one minor point regarding chiasmus will be that chiastic analysis will essentially be a neutral point on the question of the authenticity of verses 43-44, bearing no sway (not being probative either way) in evaluating the originality of verses 43-44. The textual criticism on verses 43-44, therefore, will run along traditional lines of manuscript evaluation and analysis of the appearance and use of the text of those verses in the works of the early Church Fathers. And the upcoming article will show that most early Church Fathers did refer to the verses while yet others did not, revealing that the verses were actually removed from some early manuscripts.
In Ehrman’s earlier (1983) article in *Catholic Biblical Quarterly *(Bart D. Ehrman and Mark A. Plunkett, “The Angel and tHe Agony: The Textual Problem of Luke 22:43-44,” *Catholic Biblical Quarterly *45 (1983): 401-16), Ehrman actually failed to mention manuscript Fragment 0171 (a late third or fourth century Egyptian manuscript found at Hermopolis Magna) which does include the verses. (More on this point can be read at many places, including, for example, at
accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-143064925/angel-and-sweat-like.html.)
Ehrman argues that Clement of Alexandria and Origen are witnesses against the inclusion of verses 43-44 because they did not know and in their works never cited this passage; it clearly was not contained in the scriptures they were using. The problem with reaching that conclusion from that sort of analysis is that Clement and Origen, too, did not cite about 95% of the scriptures; they cited what they cited but to conclude that a passage did not appear in their scriptures because they did not cite or quote it is risky business. For example, Clement never talks in detail about Luke’s Passion narrative. He talks more about Matthew’s Passion narrative. The fact that Clement does not cite verses 43-44 is not proof against them.
We lack about half of Clement’s treatises. Clement explicitly comments only on verse 31 and on no other verse in Luke 22. And the next time Clement actually comments on a verse in Luke is in chapter 23. We can admit that Clement never cites verses 43-44 but that fact alone does not constitute evidence against the originality of those verses.
